Allowing 3rd parties to write plug-ins for VMware vCenter was one of the best things I think we’ve ever done. One of the companies that’s taken advantage of this with some really cool and very useful tools is EMC. There are now 3 really great plug-ins for EMC users. I’ll link to the man himself (Chad Sakac) for full write-ups. Here’s a recap of the plug-ins below. All of these are free.
1) EMC Storage Viewer – This little gem allows some really great views all the way down into the array that’s underneath you hosts. Here’s a short video.
And here’s where you can grab it. Don’t forget the great whitepaper that goes along with it.
2) EMC Celera SRM Failback Tool – This one is awesome. If you’ve failed your environment over using VMware SRM then this tool will help you configure the storage to fail back to the original site. You can grab it here.
3) EMC Celera VDI Deployment – This will let you create a single VM on a share and then it will automatically clone that share out a bunch of times and automatically register the VMs in vCenter. Really nice way to scale out a bunch of VMs for VDI. It’s also available here.
Enjoy all of the new tools brought to you by our parent company, EMC.
I get stopped a lot at conferences and events and asked about storage layouts. I’m not sure why that is but there’s one common thread I’ve seen through all of these conversations – people really try and overcomplicate things. Usually someone is trying to over engineer a solution because that’s what you had to do in the physical world. Well, actually you didn’t need to do it in the physical world but for some reason every person I talk to thinks that their account has the biggest, meanest apps that require all of this complicated tuning in order to make run. Truth be told I’ve run into very few of those types of apps.
To make a long story short I ran across a post by Chad Sakac recently on dispelling some of the myths around VMFS. Stuff like number of VMs per volume, size of volume, and the biggest one – whether or not to use NFS. Chad goes into some great detail on all of these points and more. His most recent blog post is definitely worth a read. Actually his whole blog is worth a read but for this post I really want you to go and read the VMFS information to build your knowledgebase. I think you’ll find that keeping it simple and going with a lot of defaults makes things perform and scale well.
A couple of weeks ago I posted about SQL Server running in a VM and how disk writes were assured to happen in contradiction to a poorly written article on SQL Solutions. After working with VMware Engineering there’s now a KB article that talks about how and when I/O writes happen with different VMware products. Below is the full text of the KB article. You can also find the source here.
I’m sure whoever is reading my blog also reads Jason Boche’s blog. If not, then go subscribe now. Jason is a customer and writes a lot of great stuff from his point of view. He’s also very active in the VMware Communities. One of his recent posts was about how to get more VMs to VMotion at one time. This comes in really handy when you want to do maintenance on a host that’s running a ton of VMs. So click on to read all about how to increase the number of VMs that can migrate at a time.
Well, my last tip on putting your Mac to sleep faster was such a huge hit as you can see below that I thought I’d post another Mac tip up here. Don’t worry virtualization people, I’ll get back to that in a minute.
I stumbled across this tip when I hit the wrong key one day. If you’re typing along and you hit the “esc” key in the middle of a word then a list of possible words pops up. Use the arrow keys to get to the one you want and hit tab and the word completes. This works in any normally behaving Mac app. I say normally behaving because Microsoft Office doesn’t support this for some reason. Leave it to Redmond to screw that up.
What’s even neater is that it works with any word that it sees in the current document or page as well as dictionary words. This comes in real handy if you’re coding and need to complete some long entry. It also comes in handy for all the times you need to type in Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
OK. Not exactly related to virtualization but I thought I’d share this anyways. I am always on the move and I’m usually bringing my Mac with me. One of my favorite things about the Mac is that I can really just close the lid and walk to a meeting and open the lid and it’s ready to work instantly. That’s just incredible to me. Sure, a PC can sleep and even hibernate but neither makes the thing come alive quickly. The one painful thing for me has been waiting for my Mac to sleep. I run a lot of stuff all the time. Right now I have 21 different apps open plus a VM running in VMware Fusion. That means that when my Mac goes to sleep I have to wait for it to write most of the 4 GB of RAM to disk. A fellow engineer just showed me a faster way to make the Mac sleep – adjust the hibernatemode variable.
When I used to run datacenters every outage or blip or error was blamed on the firewall(s). Some DBA would call up and say their Oracle database is running slow and ask if we had made any changes to the firewall. Uh, no and you’re not even going through the firewall to get to the database. The firewall was that mysterious black box that everyone could blame because no one knew where it was or what went through it or what kind of control it had.
Enter virtualization – the new firewall. Coffee maker broken? It must be that virtualization we’re using. NIC doesn’t connect to the network? Gotta be that darn virtualization again. It’s always the virtualization layer’s fault. Maybe we need to do some better education with people about what the virtualization layer does and exactly how transparent it is. There are so many myths I see floating around the Internet blaming virtualization on this or that.
Well, if you’re ever in a bind one way to check if virtualization is the problem or not is to try things without virtualization in the middle. Carlo over at VMware Info posted a blog recently about how he quickly diagnosed a network problem just by booting the host with a LiveCD. No there’s some thinking! Finally someone gets it.
So if you’re ever in need of a quick sanity check a LiveCD may be just the thing you need. Now if we could just virtualize that and stick it into people’s heads then maybe they’ll stop blaming everything on the new firewall.
At VMworld this year during my Deploying VMware in a Linux Shop I demonstrated how to PXE boot VMware ESXi and automatically add it to Virtual Center. As promised a long time ago I’m finally documenting everything I did to get it to work. All of the work for this project was really done by an incredible engineer here at VMware named Lance Berc. I’m just putting some more step-by-step to it and making the process easier to find. Thanks, Lance for all of your work on this and the long night just before VMworld trying to troubleshoot issues!
At VMworld 2008 earlier this year I did a presentation on Deploying VMware in a Linux Shop. The first part of this presentation included a section on the guest OS and best practices. Our Linux team at VMware has now come up with a great whitepaper that includes all of these tips and best practices. You can find the paper on the tech resource site on vmware.com.
“Companies considering standardizing best practices for x86-based server virtualization should think about how they plan to incorporate desktop, application, storage and network virtualization in the future.”
That’s just one of the great tips from a new article on NetworkWorld. Usually I find articles like this and they have a few ok tips and then a lot that are off the wall. This one however was perfect the whole way through. I couldn’t have given better advice myself. If you are virtualized or thinking on going virtual then you need to take 10 minutes and go read this article now.
Rich Brambley over at VM /ETC posted an interesting blog entry today about restricting access to download the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client from the ESX web page. Not exactly sure how useful this will be to people or not but I always like to pass along interesting or useful posts. Read the full article over on VM /ETC.
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Disclaimer
I work for VMware as a Principal Systems Engineer. The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by VMware and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of VMware. This is my blog - not a VMware blog.
Title:Presentation Zen
Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery Author: Garr Reynolds ISBN 10: 0-321-52565-5
This is my second read about creating great presentations. I love this book because it has sample after sample of really nice presentations and describes why they are great. For more good reads visit the Good Reads page.
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